Mistress of the Game

Chapter Fourteen

PAOLO COZMICI BARKED IRRITABLY AT HIS BOYFRIEND: "SO? Are you going to tell me what it says?"

The world-famous conductor was having breakfast at his usual table at Le Vaudeville on Rue Vivienne in Paris. An Art Deco hangout popular with locals and tourists alike, Le Vaudeville was Paolo Cozmici's home away from home, a place he came to relax. Henri, the ma?tre d', knew where Paolo Cozmici liked to sit. He knew that Paolo liked the milk for his cafe au lait warm, not hot, that Paolo's pain chocolat should always be light on the pain, heavy on the chocolat; and that Paolo did not expect to have to move to a table near the window in order to chain-smoke his beloved Gauloise cigarettes.

Everybody who knew Paolo Cozmici knew that his Sunday-morning ritual was sacrosanct and unchanging. His boyfriend knew it best of all. And yet the unfathomable boy had arrived for breakfast late, distracted, still dressed in his jogging pants (Paolo deplored jogging pants), and bleating on about some ridiculous letter he'd received from his kid sister back home.

I suppose it serves me right for falling in love with an American, thought Paolo philosophically. Barbarians, all of them, from sea to stinking sea.

"She wants me to come to her sixteenth birthday party next month. Apparently my father's throwing her a big bash at Cedar Hill House."

Paolo blew a disdainful smoke ring in his lover's direction. "O???"

"It's kind of like a family compound. It's in Maine on a little island called Dark Harbor. You won't have heard of it, but it's a magical place. I haven't been there since my mom was alive."

"You're not seriously thinking of going?" Paolo Cozmici sounded incredulous. "Robert, my sweet, you 'ave concerts booked every weekend in July. Paris, Munich, London. You can't just pull out."

"Come with me?"

Paolo almost choked on his croissant.

"Come with you? Absolutely not. Now I 'ave irrefutable evidence, mon amour. You have lost your mind."

"Maybe." Robbie Templeton smiled, and Paolo Cozmici felt his resolve melting like a bar of chocolate in the sunshine. "But you knew I was crazy when you fell for me. Didn't you?"

Raising Paolo's hand to his lips, Robbie kissed it softly.

"Hmm," Paolo grumbled. "Oui, je suppose."

The love affair between Robbie Templeton, the American piano prodigy and classical music's hottest male pinup, and Paolo Cozmici, the fat, bald, famously irascible Italian conductor, was a mystery to all who knew them, as well as to millions who did not.

It began six years ago. Robbie, then almost twenty, had just arrived in Paris and was living hand to mouth as a freelance piano player, moving from bar to bar and jazz club to jazz club, wherever the work took him.

"You're being stubborn, Robert. I've told you, you can have an allowance."

Peter Templeton had mixed feelings about his son's Great European Adventure. He and Robbie had been reconciled for less than a year. Now Peter was sitting across the table from him at the Harvard Club, being told that he was about to lose him all over again.

"I don't want your money, Dad. I need to do this by myself."

"You've no idea what the real world is like, Robert."

You'd be surprised how much I know about the real world, Dad.

"You don't even speak French."

"I'll learn."

"At least let me set up a bank account for you at Societe Generale. You can look on it as emergency money. A safety net, should you need it."

Robbie looked at his father and felt a stab of pity for him. Lexi's kidnapping had aged him permanently. The reality of caring for a deaf child, even one as determined and independent as Lexi, had also taken its toll. Every hour Peter spent away from his daughter was an anxious, guilt-ridden purgatory: he hadn't been there when Lexi needed him most. The least he could do was to be there now, protecting her, loving her, helping her cope with her disability.

The irony was that Lexi was coping just fine. It was Peter who was lost.

Robbie's fixed mental image of his father was of a strong, handsome, youthful man, a sportsman and a scholar. But the truth was that that man had died years ago. The face Robbie saw across the table from him now was broken and defeated, crisscrossed with lines and dark shadows under the eyes. It was a road map of suffering, a lifetime of loss. And it had all started because he married a Blackwell.

Kruger-Brent did that to him. The curse of the Blackwell family. Don't you see, Dad? I can't stay. I can't let myself be broken, like you were.

"Honestly, Dad, I appreciate the offer. But I don't want the money. I've only been clean for eleven months, remember? A big fat French bank account might be more temptation than I could handle."

It was this last argument that had finally won Peter over. He knew that if Robert ever went back to drugs or drinking, he would die. It was that simple.

"Fine. Have it your way. But promise me, when the romance of the whole starving-musician-in-a-garret thing wears off, you won't be too proud to come home. I...I love you, Robert. I hope you know that."

Robbie's eyes filled with tears.

I know, Dad. I love you, too. But I have to go.

The first few months were a living hell.

Dad was right. What in God's name have I gotten myself into?

Unable to afford even a shoe box in the city center, Robbie had finally rented a room in Ogrement, a run-down part of the suburb of epinay-sur-Seine. It was the most depressing place he had ever seen. Ugly sixties tenement buildings with broken windows, the stairwells covered in graffiti and stinking of piss, were home to a plethora of gangs and petty criminals. The gangs seemed to split along racial and religious lines. Ogrement was not a great place to be a Jew, that was for sure. But neither was it overly welcoming of preppy, blond Americans whose six words of French included foie gras and clavier (piano keyboard), but not percer (to stab) or filou (pickpocket).

The one language Robbie did understand was drugs. Ogrement was fueled by heroin the same way that China was fueled by rice. It was everywhere, calling to him, tempting him like the siren call of the sea.

It's like renting a room over a kindergarten class to a newly released pedophile. God help me.

Robbie was determined to stay clean. He knew his life depended on it. But it was tough. The loneliness was grinding, soul destroying, and ever present. Not being able to communicate was the worst part.

Why did I have to "find myself" in France? Why couldn't I have gone to London, or Sydney, or some other place where they speak English?

Of course, Robbie knew the answer to that. Paris was the musicians' mecca. The Paris Conservatoire, where Bizet and Debussy had once studied, was a place of mythical significance to Robbie. The newly opened Cite de la Musique, architect Christian de Portzamparc's celebrated ampitheater, concert hall, museum of music, and workshops in La Vil-lette, the old slaughterhouse district, had a new generation of musicians and composers flocking to the city.

The best musical talent in the world came to Paris. It was the center, the hub, the beginning and the end of everything for a would-be concert pianist like Robbie.

Unfortunately, would be turned out to be the operative words. Since he had no formal training or qualifications, the conservatoire refused even to see him, never mind hear him play. Simply finding bar work proved far harder than Robbie had imagined. The problem with moving to the most exciting city in the world for classical music was that everyone else had done the same thing. Paris was crawling with hot-shit piano players, and most of them had years of experience. Robbie was an unknown Yank whom no one could understand, who'd once had a job playing blues piano in a gay bar in New Orleans for all of three weeks.

Robbie did, however, have three things going for him. Talent, determination and looks. And the greatest of these was looks.

"Pay is fifty francs an hour, plus tips. Take it or leave it."

Madame Aubrieau ("Please, call me Martine") was a fifty-two-year-old ex-hooker who wore a blond wig to cover her bald patches, weighed approximately the same as a young hippo and whose breath smelled of a combination of garlic, menthol cigarettes and Benedictine that made Robbie want to gag. She wore a low-cut, cheap red top that exposed a quivering expanse of larva-white cleavage, and when she spoke to Robbie, she stared unashamedly at his crotch.

In addition to these attributes, Madame Aubrieau owned Le Club Canard, a dive bar in the twelfth arondissement whose piano player had quit the previous week in a dispute over unpaid wages. Madame Aubrieau liked the look of the shy young American. If he took the job, she would eat him for breakfast. Afterward, she would have him eat her. It was good to be the boss.

Robbie looked at Madame Aubrieau's Jabba the Hut body and felt sick. Fifty francs an hour was not a living wage. On the other hand, his current earnings of zero francs an hour were beginning to irritate Marcel, his Ogrement landlord. Marcel was not a man Robbie wished to irritate.

"I'll take it. When do I start?"

Madame Aubrieau clamped a fat, dirty-fingernailed hand on Robbie's thigh and flashed him a toothless smile.

"Immediatement, mon chou. Suivez moi."

Robbie first laid eyes on Paolo Cozmici at the Salle Pleyel concert hall on the Rue Faubourg Saint-Honore. Cozmici was conducting the resident Orchestre de Paris. And he was magnificent.

Like every other musician in Paris, Robbie knew of Paolo Cozmici by reputation. The youngest son of a dirt-poor family from Naples, Cozmici was completely self-taught as a composer, a pianist and, most recently, a conductor. Nicknamed Le Bouledogue - "the bulldog" - by the French musical establishment, Paolo Cozmici had famously won his place as conductor of the Paris Philharmonic by storming unannounced into rehearsals for Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 5 in E Minor, seizing the baton from a bewildered Claude Dechamel and displaying the sort of instinctive virtuosity that had since made him one of the most sought-after conductors in the world.

In the front row of the glorious Art Deco concert hall, Robbie Templeton sat mesmerized. Later, he would be unable to recall the specific piece that Paolo had been conducting. All he remembered was the beauty and grace of his movements, at one with the music, swept up in the same passion that Robbie himself felt whenever he sat at a piano stool. Robbie could see nothing of Paolo but his back - an ill-fitting tuxedo jacket stretched across broad, workman's shoulders - but it didn't matter. Just watching Cozmici at work gave him a sexual charge so violent it was all Robbie could do not to jump out of his chair and storm the stage.